April 12, 2009

What Do You Want? Empowerment

What do you want from your staff?In the last four posts we’ve looked at compliance, achievement, innovation and creativity.

In the last post we said, "Creativity is not the same as organized chaos. Creativity still keeps focus on the mission/purpose but is willing to test the status quo to determine its structural integrity and relevancy. As a Christ follower and leader when you consider the necessity to find new ways to minister and reach out to the community, how much tradition and traditional thinking remains on the table?”

Even if the easy correcting issues get satisfied with compliance or even achievement, it’s not good enough.Settling for either is squandering an opportunity for discipleship and is simply poor stewardship of those entrusted to you.

As a leader, there comes a point when getting expectations of compliance or achievement met by staff is inadequate for the demands and opportunities of ministry.Asking, expecting and requiring innovation and even creativity are good steps in discipling staff to their potential and the ministry’s need, but is that all there is?No.Fortunately, there is more, and it’s the process of empowerment.The word “empowerment” is beginning to suffer from a lack of clear meaning due to overuse, yet staff empowerment, when it’s there, is the model of Christian community and ministry.

Empowerment is not a clever term for abdication, delegation or manipulation.The word means to give power and/or authority to another person.As the word implies, power is transferred, generated and possessed by those charged with applying the “it” of why the enterprise was created.Empowerment means allowing a team member to discover and grow their own power through an enrichment process initiated and fostered by the leader. And autonomy, responsibility, flexibility, maturity, anticipatory communication and open accountability and feedback are key elements of empowerment.

When we see empowerment at work in Christian community there is a high level of staff and team member trust-- the core component of empowerment.Team members share a common vision, have developed self-management and self-initiation disciplines and skills and the focus is on customers/ministry recipients rather than being totally team centered.Empowerment develops in an environment where team members are more concerned about the success of accomplishing what the team was created for and the full utilization of other members rather than personal success or security.Likewise, each team member knows that that same concern is shared for them by everyone else.

Empowerment as a discipline requires time to develop and mature within the leader, staff, new staff, volunteers, members, and recipients of the ministry.But when it becomes a cultural and philosophical precept of how ministry is done, ministry gets done magnificently.In a process model, empowerment is at the opposite end of the spectrum from authoritarian transactional leading.While empowerment focused leadership is more effective than transactional, it is not superior to other styles.Transactional leading is for new team members.Once mission, vision, values, goals and procedures are indoctrinated the maturing team member responds best to a transformational style of leadership.However, only after a team member has the self-management, self-correcting and self-initiating skills can empowerment be successful for both the team member and the team.

At a spiritual level, empowerment is evidenced by allowing the Holy Spirit who inhabits every Christian to exercise his power through our submission.This was the greater treasure available to the rich young ruler.Sadly he, like many of us, was inclined to put his trustin things he made, accumulated and could count. But the worldly power he was seeking and the same sought today is never enough to satisfy or fulfill the potential God has in mind for our lives.

The rich young ruler had a comprehension problem.He no doubt enjoyed the power that position, prestige, wealth and religious status afforded him by birth.He was a powerful person in a land of unbelievable poverty yet and he was an observant Jew, one who worked very hard at being righteous, but obviously, something was missing.While he had more power than he could use he did not feel empowerment.All that work and yet a feeling of emptiness.He certainly did not feel empowered by God since most of his religious life centered around trying to please/appease God rather than being a vessel for use by God.For all that he had and all he had accomplished, something was missing and it was bothering him.But the empowerment came with a price.Everything.Simply give up your power for my power was the offer of Jesus.He missed it.

Too often we commit the same error.We could gain a quantum leap of effectiveness in enterprise or ministry if we just gave up our power over staff and empowered them to do what was good, right, mature and smart.But then we wouldn’t have the same puny power the rich young ruler had, would we?

1 Comment

In football, the quarterback hands the ball to the halfback, circles out and watches him run. In empowered leadership, the quarterback hands the ball to the halfback and then becomes his chief blocker, removing obstacles to the fulfillment of the delegated task.

In a day where we have access to thousands of books on Christian leadership, we still have leaders who have only learned the vocabulary. Thank you for an excellent article on Empowerment. I pray that readers will lead and not watch.